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IMSAI Series Two
Dino writes "You can actually pre-order a new IMSAI here. These folks bought the rights to produce the IMSAI in the late seventies, and provided the unit used in Wargames. It has a genuine S100 bus, but also has modern features as well, the most interesting being a driver that will allow you to access an ATX motherboard via the parallel port as a disk drive."
A couple of years ago I saw a nice, wood case NorthStar S100 system sitting on a surplus table for a very modest amount. I was tempted, but had to admit that there was nothing I would do with it. Would have had to use a PC as a terminal into the NorthStar, and even an old 386 could emulate the S100 machine faster than the S100. So what's to be gained by running an S100 system?
Of course the IMSIA would at least have the nice Blinkin' Lights, the NorthStar was one of the S100 PC's that avoided them and went right to a ROM monitor, but beyond that I can't see anything I would enjoy about an old S100 system.
By the way, Bil Gates didn't have an S100 system when he wrote MS Basic. He used an Emulator. The way I heard it from another student there at the time, as a student he got caught at Harvard running the emulator for commercial gain (developing a commercial product, MS Basic). He was instructed to cease immidately, or he would be thrown out of the university. He elected to leave. (Can anyone confirm that this is how it went down?) Lets just all be glad that he doesn't do such questionable things anymore. ;-)
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My uncle had built the thing from a kit, and then we inheritted it. We didn't quite have to key in binary code on the front panel (although it was a good exercise), but I DO remember being excited about getting a used 32K S-100 memory card up at the Trenton Computer Festival (do they still have those?). We started off with a cassette interface and a 64x16 character monochrome display. Eventually added two 'hard-sector' 5-1/4 inch floppies (about 100K each). The processor got upgraded from the original 8080 to an 8085 and later a Z-80. We also built a TMS9918A-based video card (that was a pretty neet chip - wasn't it used in the Colecovision or something?) and I later built a MIDI interface for it. This was all back in the early/mid-eighties. A BSEE, MSEE, and 15 years of experience later, I still learned a lot of what I use on a regular basis on that machine.
I can faithfully say that the IMSAI 8080 was the first computer I ever used. That was in 1979.
The only specs I recall are that it had 16K of RAM, a cassette interface, and some kind of keyboard and CRT interface.
We had a tape with a version of BASIC that left about 7K available for programs.
It was built by a special class the year before I arrived at the school, and stored in the Chemistry/Physics lab.
No doubt the machine was a lethal instrument as the monitor was simply a bare chassis and tube, with no case at all.
I fondly recall a program called "Sub Hunt" that was written for it that got me interested in programming. The teacher showed me one day how to use the BASIC, and then left. I flailed completely for the next 4 hours forgetting something truly simple (like how math worked, or INPUT). After he showed me the next day, I took off from there and never looked back.
In my high school days I ditched only two classes. One was Senior German, and we had managed to convince the entire class to ditch that day. One went back, spoiling the entire plan.
The other class was Drivers Ed. I ditched it so I could sneak in to play with the new found wonder in the blue box.
The box had a large hand printed sign in BLOCK letter "DO NOT TURN OFF!". This sign was necessary because the only way to load the BASIC was to get into the machine monitor, and type roughly 100 bytes of hex, which happened to be a bootstrap tape loader. You typed it in, hit RUN, and turned the tape to PLAY.
A friend and I once tried to load this monitor with the front panel, but that was a nightmare and didn't work, so we gave up.
I discovered this machine late in my sophmore year, and that summer someone donated several Commadore PET computers, so next year we jumped on those without ever looking back.
It was interesting at the time, and I'm indebted to that fact that this thing opened my eyes to the wonders of computers, but I don't actually miss the machine itself.
As I distantly recall from an article I read around the time the movie was released, the filmmakers made a point to make sure that Matthew Broderick's rig was accurate inasmuch as being real technology available at that time, rather than the usual (for that time period) cardboard mockups that were used in most movies. They also wanted to give the impression that it was sort of secondhand or castoff gear that an avid geeky kid might piece together-- even at the time that film was made, 8-inch floppies and acoustic couplers were well on their way out.
He may very well have. The IMDB page has no listing for the computer voice.
http://us.imdb.com/Credits?0086567
Odd, since they list all the way down to the lighting techs. So I guess it must have been someone doing double duty.
Someone needs to remind these guys what year it is. Had something like this come out in 1977 or so it would have been a competitive product. The problem is that it is 25 years later now and while Star Wars might not look too dated this thing sure does. S-100 systems and CP/M have been dead since before a good majority of the slashdot community were even born. Is there some reason why I should now shell out a thousand dollars for an S-100 system? For that kind of money I could get a Sun Blade 100, build myself a pretty decent Athlon system, or get my car's transmission fixed.
This product surely belongs in the more dollars than sense catagory.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
How do you war dial on an acoustic modem? Even if it could generate DTMF tones to dial the phone it couldn't work the hook switch to dial the next number.
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